Talks

With IPv4 exhaustion fast approaching, IPv6 is becoming an increasingly relevant topic, yet relatively few IT professionals have any IPv6 training or experience.

This talk will introduce the basic concepts of IPv6 and show you how to deploy IPv6 on a linux system as well as enable IPv6 for several essential services such as DNS, Mail, Web, etc.

The presenter brings several years of operational IPv6 experience and operational real world examples to life to help demystify and explain IPv6 in operational terms. The examples are intended to show you working IPv6 configurations that you can adapt to your environment.

Why do conference and school wireless networks always work so poorly? As IT professionals we are used to the network ‘just working’ and fixing things by changing configuration files. This mind-set, combined with obvious, but wrong choices in laying out a wireless network frequently lead to a network that seems to work when it’s tested, but that then becomes unusable when placed under load. This is at its worst at technical conferences where there are so many people, each carrying several devices, all trying to use the network at the same time and in schools where you pack students close together and then try to have them all use their computers at the same time.

Is this a fundamental limitation of wireless? While it is true that there are some issues that cannot be solved, there are a lot of things that the network administrator can do to make the network work better. The key issue is the obvious, but under appreciated fact that Wireless networking is radio communications first. If your radio link doesn’t work well, you have no chance of fixing it with your configuration and software. This talk is intended to give you an appreciation of what the issues are, and enough information to know what sorts of things to look out for when planning a high density wireless network.

The Ganeti Virtual Cluster management software is an open source project built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and other Open Source software. Ganeti takes care of disk creation, migration, OS installation, shutdown, startup, and can be used to preemptively move a virtual machine off a physical machine that is starting to get sick. It doesn’t require a big expensive SAN, complicated networking, or a lot of money. The project is used around the world by many organizations; it is sponsored by Google and hosted at http://code.google.com/p/ganeti.

This talk will include a general overview of the system, a demo, plus an explanation of how virtualization improves Time Management for system administrators and our users alike.

Now and in the future data can and will need to be like water changing state, container and motion over the course of time. This session will focus on how the importance and use of data evolve over time and cover examples for bringing together real-time and historical data across Hadoop, Splunk, Cassandra, and MySQL.

Modern system administration automates configuration management using state of the art tools. Here is an introduction to Cfengine, the open source configuration management tool with the longest track record, a large user base, and cutting edge features. System administrators will take back to work an understanding of Cfengine 3 including it’s syntax and benefits, and will be able to start using it.